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Abstract by Dr. Gay:

Many authors explore the worlds and minds of enslaved Americans; fewer explore the minds of those who owned slaves. In my forthcoming book I address this imbalance. I ask and answer this question: why did Americans own slaves? I propose two answers: ownership promised to make the them rich; it also afforded them immense, irreplaceable pleasures. For a few these were sexual pleasures; for the majority, male and female alike, they were pride, entitlement, luxury, superiority, and 'nobility' as persons who controlled other human beings like the lords and ladies of the great estates. By denying the ubiquity and commonality of these latter pleasures we make American slavey obscure. The Civil War becomes mysterious; as do the South's defense of the institution and 150 years of hostility to African Americans

VolneyGay, PhD is Professor of Religious Studies, Psychiatry, and Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He was certified in Adult Psychoanalysis in 1990 by the American Psychoanalytic Association and was made a Training and Supervising Analyst in December 1994. His book, Freud on Sublimation, won the Heinz Hartmann Award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Among his recent books are Joy and the Objects of Psychoanalysis, Progress in the Humanities, and Neuroscience and Religion. He twice won an Outstanding Teacher Award from the Vanderbilt Department of Psychiatry, the Outstanding Service Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator Award, International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. His new book is: On the Pleasures of Owning Persons: the Hidden Face of American Slavery. International Psychoanalytic Books, New York City, 2016.